Spell Canceling Question

[Kyo]

I read a few different things in regards to it, which is true?

You can only spellcancel at 999 tech uses.
Your spellcancels get faster the more usages it has.
Your spellcancels get better after certain tresholds. (200, 300 etc as an example idea)

Someone said, you can kinda spellcancel before 999 already, so I'm assuming he meant there is a gradual lag reduction? Kinda curious what it actually is now, working on setting it up for the characters I care about, aka all of them, but I would stop before 999 if I could reasonably spc prior to it already and let AI handle it from there slowly.

[Fizban]

Dunno what you mean by spellcanceling. If you've started casting and hit guard you stop casting. If it's some sort of "hit the button so you can move sooner than normal," there are compound ex skills that are supposed to affect that.

[Aifread]

Originally posted by Fizban:

Dunno what you mean by spellcanceling. If you've started casting and hit guard you stop casting. If it's some sort of "hit the button so you can move sooner than normal," there are compound ex skills that are supposed to affect that.

He's referring to a hidden mechanic you can perform in a lot of Tales games. If you get a spell's usage up to a certain point, you can use it to cancel out of the lag that comes from the end of a combo so you can string combos together indefinitely. Look up "tales of symphonia spell cancel" on Youtube.

As for OP's question, I'm not sure. I know they changed things up with the HD version so I don't know what's correct anymore.

[Kyo]

Originally posted by Aifread:

As for OP's question, I'm not sure. I know they changed things up with the HD version so I don't know what's correct anymore.

I grinded colette to 700 spell usages yesterday and she seems to be able to spc fine now. It's still not instantly, but the delay is short enough for it to be useful. So it definitely is a gradual process. It's not too important if it gets faster with every cast or only every 50 or 100 cast I guess, so I think I answered my own question with my long grind yesterday. I'll still get her to 999 today though.

If anyone else wants to grind spell/skill uses efficiently, my team setup for this was Genis, Raine, Regal/Zelos/Kratos + Character to boost if not already included.

Set Raine and Genis to frontline, disable Genis techs via strategy menu, tell Raine to heal, tell Regal/Zelos to heal and disable all of their other techs. Those 3 will distract the enemy and giving them weak weapons, the fight will pretty much take forever, so you can just stand back and spam whatever skills. I did this against very weak fish-type enemies at a beach.

By doing this, you'll also passively grind Regal/Kratos/Raine to 999 heal usages for their own spc, which is quite useful. You can even do this semi afk by only allowing the primary character to use skills you want to improve usage count on and using auto. All you have to do now is run around with a dark bottle a few steps and confirm the battle after a few minutes and repeat while you do something else. Make 100% sure though that your team can't die in the area you've chosen and save from time to time. Wolf type enemies etc really are annoying, cause they could stunlock your casters so heals never go through.

Additional tip, remember that your skills do not need to hit anything at all to improve usage count, you can just turn your back to the enemies and whiff with everything. You should equip your character with tp cost reduction and regeneration gear as well. If you're doing it manually with spells, you could choose a spell that pretty much never hits a target well etc to extend the battle. Also, you can grind cooking for your characters while doing this, which will also help with tp consumption, if it's not already covered.

[Aifread]

If you wanna grind up a basic attack spell like Fireball on Kratos or Zelos it's faster to do with the compound EX Skill "Aerial Spell." Or if you're impatient like me and are using TSFix you can set the background fps higher to use as a speed hack and have any spell up to 999 uses in 20 minutes.

[Kyo]

WAIT THAT WORKS? I spent hours on this already, but I still need to farm grade, I assume it also helps with that? I also set up afk methods for some skills, such as the healing abilities, where I can just step away from my comp for a few hours and the battle never ends, nor my characters die or run out of tp, but take enough damage to frequently cast a healing spell..

Can raising the fps cause any issues/problems and what did you set it to?

[Aifread]

I set the BackgroundFPS parameter to 120.0 in the tsfix.ini file and then alt-tabbed to something else while I mashed the tech shortcut on my controller. Kept the health bars still visible from my other window so I could see if something went horribly wrong. For Fireball you can just have the caster face the wrong way and it'll never hit anything.

And aside from making the game otherwise comically unplayable, the speed hack didn't cause any issues for me. If you set it too high it can cause major slowdowns though (I eventually settled on 120 as safe. 4x speed is more than fast enough for anything you might wanna do.)

[Aifread]

Also, regarding grade. I think someone made a post here at some point about editing a save file to give himself as much grade as he wanted. There was also a question about doing the same thing for tech usages, but I don't know if they ever found solutions for either.

[Kyo]

Good to know! I personally don't really like save editing though, it takes any accomplishment from it, at the same time however, I don't judge at all, as the grind is super easy, super repetitive and thus boring. I already completed it and farmed enough grade yesterday though, I got about 2.5k now, 3.5k with game completition bonus, so I can take over all the important things to NG+ finally. (gems, titles, everything else afterwards is just a bonus, a very welcome bonus though)

[Aifread]

Yeah I'll only save edit out of convenience. I'm not for hacking in all titles or anything like that. I did give myself Golden Armor my last playthrough because I forgot to do the first part of that sidequest waaaaay at the beginning of the game and needed it to take on the Hero Trio on Mania. And I gave myself a bunch of ex gem maxes just so I don't have to waste grade on buying gems from vendors every time I wanna change my setup.